Yeah, that post was getting way too long, so I made some cuts here and there. The issue was in the way SE2 detects hardware… or more like doesn’t detect my GPU at all, throws an error about it and refuses to start. Under Bazzite it starts the game first 🎉, then complains that my hardware might not be good enough to run this game 🤯, but the beautiful graphics say otherwise. It’s still in early access, so I guess this kind of strange behavior will be ironed out sooner or later.

I got tired of researching this issue in Debian, so once I got it up and running in Bazzite, I stopped reading about it. Honestly, I have no idea what’s the key difference here. Is it the driver version, Proton-GE or something else? Who knows.

Anyway, I would recommend trying Bazzite. It has some pre-configured tricks that seem to handle weird cases like this.